We are excited to welcome our newest curator, Vaughn Shirey, to the Florida Museum of Natural History. Working in the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, Shirey will help study, grow and digitize our moth and butterfly collections.

Shirey is a conservation biologist who uses museum specimens to determine how organisms are being affected by a host of modern ills, including climate change, habitat destruction and pesticide use, especially in places where few other researchers tend to go.

“I love extreme environments in general, and I think it’s really interesting to study how butterflies in those environments are responding to global change,” he said.

In 2017, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship that took him to the University of Helsinki. Situated just above the 60th parallel, the city is perpetually covered in snow during the winter months and receives a meager six hours of sunlight on its shortest day. Shirey was stirred by the extremes of light and temperature, as well as the vast, open, empty spaces of Finland, where he set out on regular hikes into the wilderness without a map on what he called “get lost days.” These excursions were formative.

“One spring, I was doing a get lost day and was sitting on rocks surrounded by spruce trees and butterflies that were fluttering around after the longest, most depressing winter imaginable.” His first thought was how such small and delicate animals managed to cross the life-numbing barrier of a boreal winter.

“Then I was instantly curious about how climate change is impacting these environments and what that means for this thing that has evolved to withstand that seasonality.”

The answer to his first question, he later learned, is something called the subnivium, a term used to describe the layer of snow directly above the ground but beneath the snowpack, which is exposed to the air on its surface. The snowpack insulates plants and animals overwintering in the subnivium from the frequent and prolonged sub-zero temperatures above.

But the answer to his second question — how cold-adapted butterflies were faring with climate change — was unknown.

With the experience still fresh in his mind, Shirey returned to the states later that year, where he turned his unanswered question into a doctoral degree at Georgetown University. He knew that the rate of warming in the Arctic was three to four times faster than it was in Earth’s temperate and tropical regions. He also knew that as snow gradually turned to rain with increasing temperatures, the subnivium that is so vital to overwintering organisms was in jeopardy. This means, ironically, that as the Arctic gets hotter, the more likely these organisms are to die from exposure to cold.

He conducted butterfly surveys through large swaths of Canada and Alaska. He then combined his observations with data from natural history museums, which he used to track the presence and absence of Arctic butterflies between 1970 and 2019. The results were predictably grim.

“These were the first-ever reconstructions of butterfly biodiversity up there that showed that these cold-adapted species aren’t doing so great.”

Shirey hoped his research would raise alarm bells, but he quickly learned that his was merely a muted voice in a cacophony of dire warnings made by scientists that went unheard or unheeded by policymakers.

This prompted another shift in his trajectory.

“Publishing felt like screaming into the void, so I got really interested in conservation policy, particularly in regard to endangered species.” He began assessing the health of rare organisms and vanishing ecosystems, then used his results to devise strategic policy recommendations that would confer better environmental stewardship. He helped research and write a policy brief on the agricultural practice of coating seeds with insecticides, and in a study slated for publication later this year, he reviewed the effectiveness of the U.S. Endangered Species Act for insects.

Shirey is a data scientist at heart. He enrolled as a software engineering major when he first started college at Drexel University, an experience he described as soul-sucking due to the lack of emphasis placed on impact outside of the technology sector. Though he soon switched to studying environmental science, his proclivity for numbers and code never left him.

His trademark as a scientist is compiling large and disparate datasets and sieving them through computer models to pick out patterns. In 2022, he co-authored the largest dataset of moth and butterfly traits ever assembled, which directly resulted in the discovery that butterflies originated in North America 100 million years ago. He worked as a data manager for the North American Butterfly Monitoring Network from 2020 through 2023, and he’s developed a knack for extracting critical conservation information from convoluted policy documents using natural language processing.

For a Lepidopterist with a passion for data wrangling, the Florida Museum’s McGuire Center is the place to be, and Shirey is eager to get started.

“There’s a massive potential to answer the sort of questions that I have been answering just based on the size of the butterfly and moth collections,” he said. The McGuire Center has an estimated 10 million specimens, making it one of the largest Lepidoptera collections worldwide. Scientists are constantly sifting through these stacks to solve mind-boggling evolutionary and ecological mysteries and to address the most pressing biodiversity problems of our time.

With this resource in his back pocket, Shirey wants to re-create the work he did on Arctic butterflies on a much grander scale.

“The idea is to produce a synthesis of butterfly species in North America over the last 50 years, showing their distribution trends in response to climate change, land use change and pesticides. I want to position the McGuire Center as the one-stop shop for this type of data for people to access.”

When he’s not tracking down butterflies or parsing the natural world, Shirey likes to go backpacking, play video games, discover new music and spend time with his vociferously opinionated Bengal cat, Sheikh.

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